Your company’s front line is your customer service team. They will be what people think of when they think of your brand. Customers will get their first impression of your company from your agents, so it’s important to make sure they’re providing service that meets company standards. There are a number of steps you can take to improve your team’s customer service.
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Let’s look at some ways to give great customer service:
Know What The Customer Wants
If you want to know how to give good customer service, this is the most important thing to remember. Your customer service team should do everything based on what the customer wants. Your plan for customer service will be better if you know exactly what these needs are.
Asking your customers directly is the best way to find out what they want. Use a survey, an email, a phone call, or any other way you can to find out what their needs are in your industry.
Learn To Care
The first step is to figure out what your customer needs. How you talk to them, and often more than what you say, is often more important to the success of your customer service performance strategy.
When companies try to improve their performance management systems, they often focus on how it will affect the bottom line. However, customer support teams should know that how a customer feels after working with you will increase customer loyalty.
Including empathy in your performance coaching will help you focus on improving customer satisfaction, which in turn will affect your bottom line.
Ask Customers To Give You Honest Feedback
Having a culture of honesty and integrity means more than just putting a poster up around the office. It means bringing it up in every meeting, email, and phone call you, your team, and the customer have.
When you listen to your customers’ feedback, they not only feel like you care about them, but they also feel good about your brand. Positive reviews come from good customer feedback. When customers give bad feedback, it gives us a chance to make things better.
If the customer feels more at ease, even hard conversations with them will be easier and more productive. Encourage your agents to keep up with this culture, and you’ll get real feedback to help you and your team learn and do better.
Set Up A Way To Measure How Well Your Team Does
Having goals for your team to reach in customer service performance metrics is the best way to set them up for success. The only way to find the right key performance indicators (KPIs) is to build a solid framework to help you.
Depending on what your teams are best at, you could choose to track:
- Customer Satisfaction Scores
- Negative Response Rate
- Reopen Rate First Contact Resolution
- Average Time to Resolve (ART)
- Employee engagement
Work with your team to decide which key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll track, and then use these numbers to tell you which tasks to focus on.
Set Goals For Yourself And Your Team
Once you have your framework, you can figure out what your team as a whole and each person needs to do. Let your agents set their own goals and keep track of them based on what the team agreed on as a whole.
By letting your agents set their own goals, you’re giving them the power to really own them and reach them. This sense of accomplishment makes people more engaged and helps them get more done. Then, the customer service goals of your team will naturally line up with the goals of the company.
But that doesn’t mean they will definitely reach the goals you’ve set. You can help your team solve problems when they come up by keeping track of their performance and having a culture of honesty and integrity.
Streamline Manual Processes
Process optimization can often save you and your team time and cut down on mistakes. One choice is to use software that is made to cut down on boring tasks, figure out trends, or make your reports run on their own.
With the extra time you’ll have, you can focus on more important things, like training your team, analysing data, or solving customer problems. Getting rid of these manual tasks can also encourage agents to use technology that helps them do their jobs faster and better.
Set And Share Standards For Service
It’s not enough to just set goals to reach them. Make a quality assurance framework for customer service and make sure your team knows what you expect from them. Give your agents a quality assurance checklist that tells them what is most important when they are helping customers.
No matter how you choose to give your team good feedback, make sure it’s consistent, regular, and clear. This kind of openness (see number 10 below) will do a lot for the success and motivation of your team as a whole.
Set Up A Place For Coaching
Only half the battle is won by giving your customer service teams good feedback. Sure, you can measure how well they did by looking at how long it took them to answer a call or solve a problem. But if problems come up, your teams will be able to give better customer service if they can flag them and get feedback right away. Often, what makes your feedback useful is how and why you gave it.
Rather than just telling your teams they aren’t meeting their goals, it’s more effective to tell them how they can improve. It makes things clear.
Coaching is also important to make sure that these problems don’t happen in the first place. Your customers’ experience will be better if you constantly coach, advise, and mentor your customer service agents and give them the tools to anticipate their needs.
Use An All-Channels Plan For Customer Service
In today’s digital world, it’s important to make people feel like they can reach you, but it’s also important to make sure you don’t use up all of your resources trying to be everywhere. You could offer options like email, Facebook, WhatsApp, and best live chat solutions for business websites to make things easier and faster for the customer. The first step to making this happen is to find out where your customers like to go for help and put your efforts there.
Tell The Truth And Give Feedback
Your team’s communication will be stronger if everyone is honest with each other and gives regular, high-quality feedback. By letting each team member see their numbers in real time, they will not only be more motivated, but they will also feel like they own the project.
Open communication also makes one-on-one meetings more productive because agents are no longer in the dark about how they are doing. This information helps them work more efficiently, make changes to their performance more quickly, and be ready for conversations about their results.
Use Software To Track The Performance Of Customer Service
Some people are scared of technology. The most important thing to look for in customer service performance management software is that it works well and is easy to use. At first, choosing software can be hard, but once your team is up and running, it will save you a lot of time.
Start A Programme To Thank And Reward Employees
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs says that after food, safety, and love, our fourth need is to be respected. This includes feeling liked, cared about, confident, and able to reach goals.
Make a rewards programme for your employees to make them feel like you care about them. Someone’s confidence in themselves and the company can be boosted by anything from a $5 gift card to being named employee of the month. Don’t undervalue recognition that has nothing to do with money or things. For some, it could mean the difference between just getting by and having a month with great results.
Choose The “Right” People To Hire
If you want to improve your team’s customer service skills, you should start by hiring the best people for the job. One way to do this is to look for personality and goals in addition to skills during interviews. People who want to learn can pick up what they need to know.
It can be hard to find the best candidates, but if you want to find great customer service agents, you need to test their empathy and problem-solving skills. The trick? Look for people who do everything they can to help others.
Do It The First Time You Try
One of the best ways to improve performance is to solve all customer problems the first time they come up. Calculating and keeping track of your First Contact Resolution score will help you realise how important it is to spend more time up front to make sure your first answer is good.
Leaders often spend more time thinking about how quickly a problem can be solved than actually solving the problem. This leads to a much higher rate of reopening, which makes all of your work pointless.
These tips should help you business to stand out when it coes to customer service. Do you know any other tips that should be included? Please add them in the comments below.
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